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Saturday, November 1, 2008

The sorry state of Syria's army

Lattakia, Syria -Thursday, Oct. 29

The army of the Syrian Arab Republic often appears as the bad guy in Western media narratives.

They were the brutish soldiers who oppressed Lebanon throughout their 29-year-stay in that country. They're the jihadi-friendly outfit that looks the other way as suicide bombers to be cross Syria on their way to Iraq. Israelis still shudder at the mention of 1973, when the combined forces of Syria and Egypt staged a surprise attack one October morning.

Up close, they hardly live up to their nefarious reputation. Poorly paid and badly equipped, they're most often seen walking along the side of the road in their fading camouflage gear, trying to thumb rides.

Today, I met Abdo, a 29-year-old tour guide in Lattakia who recently finished his three-year stint as a conscript. He said he earned 300 Syrian pounds per month (about $6) while stationed near the Lebanese border. "I live with my mother, but I still need 5,000 or 6,000 pounds a month," he said. Which is why Syrian soldiers are notoriously corrupt. They live on bribes.

My first encounter with the feared Syrian army on this trip was a trio of soldiers manning a checkpoint near the Turkish border. Ostensibly, they were there to examine travellers' documents, but taking shelter from the rain in a roadside shack, they were much more interested in bumming cigarettes.

"Are those good to smoke?" a somewhat portly middle-aged soldier said, spotting a pack of Dunhill cigarettes lying in the front seat of my longtime friend Raed's car.

Raed, a Jordanian and a skilled negotiator of Middle Eastern checkpoints, flipped him the whole pack. We didn't want to be held up and scutinized. (More on that later.)

Seeing our apparent generosity, two other soldiers surged forward, leaving their Kalashnikov rifles leaning against their chairs. "Hey, there are three of us," one says. Raed handed over a second pack.

The first soldier asked Raed where "the foreigner," me, was from. "Canada," Raed said.

The soldier raised his eyebrows. "He looks like one of us," he offered with a shrug before waving us on. His curiosity had been bought off by the Dunhills.

It was easy to imagine the notorious foreign fighters of Iraq sliding through the same checkpoint with even more ease.

The U.S. brazenly bombed eastern Syria this week, claiming Damacus wasn't doing enough to clamp down on the flow of jihadis into Iraq. The truth is that even if Bashar Assad's regime were to make helping the U.S. priority No. 1 (something that's unlikely given the angry, if orchestrated, demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus today) this underfunded, unmotivated force simply doesn't look nearly up to the task.

Hey, I wrote a book!

Drawing on my experiences as a foreign correspondent in Russia and the former Soviet Union, it is now available in bookstores across the United States and Canada. Turkish and Estonian deals have also been signed. More details soon.

Canadian cover

Turkish edition

Estonian edition

Reviews of The New Cold War

"If you've never read a book about the politics in the former Soviet Union, make an exception for this one. And if you're interested in post-Soviet politics, then Mark MacKinnon's The New Cold War is a must. It's a real-life political drama, a non-fiction page-turner that will keep you up at night" - Levon Sevunts, The Montreal Gazette

"The New Cold War is a first-rate book that is both timely and chilling" - Lawrence Martin, The Globe and Mail

"MacKinnon... but shows us the consequences of the war on the front lines with scintillating stories, that read almost like fiction, from places like the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus and Uzbekistan, all places he’s spent a great deal of time." - Kim Zigfeld, Pajamas Media

"[MacKinnon] comes to the same conclusions as us, the people who have been at the center of all these events" - The Messenger (Georgia)

"Fair and objective ... Reading through this well-researched work, it’s hard not to think of two sides engaged in a chess match, or better still, a game of Risk" - The Baltic Times

"Rich material... sheds new light on many events in recent history" - Itar-Tass

"Close-to-the-bone reporting that led the Kremlin to designate the author as a hostile journalist" - Kirkus Reviews

"MacKinnon's eye-opening book masterfully shows that a secret war has been in full swing for years, and that it is far from over" - Embassy magazine